He’s known for his outspoken and often controversial opinions, from saying that civil servants who have tattoos should resign, to denying the forcible recruitment of South Korean “comfort women” during the second world war.

But it was an intense debate about whether students should be allowed to have furikake seasoning with their school lunch that left city mayor Tōru Hashimoto scratching his head this week as he asked the Osaka Board of Education: “What’s wrong with furikake?!”

There’s an unwritten rule that seeing food in anime makes seem even more appealing than it would in real life. Now it seems that there may actually be some scientific evidence supporting that idea. A pilot study conducted recently in Brooklyn, New York found that manga can be used as a tool to encourage children and teenagers to increase their fruit intake.

Tomoko Wakasugi (Grandma Wakasugi) is a prolific writer on the shokuyo style of eating. Shokuyo is a lifestyle similar to a macrobiotic diet in which only all natural grains and plants are prepared and eaten carefully to maintain physical and mental health and combat disease.

She said that she began her writing career after prolonging her husband’s life to six years after he was only given two months to live by doctors. His dying wish was for her to help others through her knowledge of alternative nutrition.

“School lunch” and “healthy”; these two things don’t always go together. Despite numerous doctors and scientists stressing the importance of properly fueling the growing bodies of young children, budget cuts and time constraints (among other excuses) make it extremely difficult to deliver nutritious foods to schools.

When snapshots of American school lunches showed up on Japanese site Naver Matome, many Japanese citizens were horrified by the greasy slop masquerading as food that was strewn about the plastic lunch trays.

You’re on a diet, and you’re watching calories like a hawk. You check every label at the supermarket and stay away from fast food, but what do you do at restaurants that don’t offer detailed nutritional information on their menus?

It seems like your only two options are to put your diet in jeopardy and take a leap of faith, or avoid the restaurant and miss out on a delicious meal.

A third option is in the works. In the near future, you will be able to take a picture of the food with your smartphone and consult your virtual nutritionist.

Nutritional information web service Asken is using the latest Sony technology to give dieters a handy tool for managing caloric intake. The technology analyzes images of full meals and picks apart the various components, displaying the name and caloric value of each part as well as the total nutritional value of the entire meal.Read More